Executions and Audiences

September 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When you are executing people, as with any performance, you have to know your audience.

When the Sirjan [Iran] town authorities tried to hang two men convicted of robbery on the morning of Dec. 22, protestors threw stones at the police and members of the court carrying out the execution. . .  the protestors also shot at officers with handguns.
Amidst the chaos, the protestors managed to cut down the convicts, who were still alive a minute after the attempted hanging  (Story here, but do not go there if you are troubled by pictures and videos of this sort of thing.)

The hangmen misjudged their audience.  They could have played to a much more receptive crowd – the Republicans who showed up for the candidates’ debate Wednesday. 

Brian Williams began a question to Gov. Rick Perry, “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates more than any other governor in modern times . . .”  But before Williams could finish, the Republican faithful, on hearing that number, broke into applause.  Listen to the enthusiasm.

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We don’t know how long the applause would have continued if Brian Williams hadn’t interrupted to continue his question.

Oh my, those Republicans.  They sure do love them some executions.*  The applause wasn’t thunderous – the deaths under Perry work out to a measly two a month, barely one-tenth of what Iran generates.  But Texas currently has more than 300 people on death row.  Imagine the Republican audience reaction if Gov. Perry can manage to get most of those 300 executed before the next debate.  An O for sure.  With 500 executions under his belt next time, not 234, there’s gonna be a lot of love in that room.  

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* They also have a curious fondness for torture.  See my earlier post here.

New York Sports

September 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Cities provide all sorts of free amenities and diversions for those who live and visit there.  But New York offers free Foosball.  Can other cities make that statement? These tables are only a block from Madison Square Garden, so you have a choice: Foosball or the Knicks. 

 

That Uncertain Feeling

September 5. 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A shorter version of this is posted at Sociological Images) 

Long before the Freakonomics guys hit the best seller list by casting their economic net in sociological waters, there was Gary Becker.  If you want to explain why people (some people) commit crimes or get married and have babies, Becker argued, just assume that people are economically rational.  Follow the money and look at the bottom line.  You don’t need concepts like culture or socialization, which in any case are vague and hard to measure.*

Becker wrote no best-sellers, but he did win a Nobel.  His acceptance speech: “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.” 

In a Wall Streeet Journal op-ed Friday about the recession, Becker started off Labor Day weekend weighing in on unemployment and the stalled recovery.  His explanation:  in a word, uncertainty.

These laws [financial regulation, consumer protection] and the continuing calls for additional regulations and taxes have broadened the uncertainty about the economic environment facing businesses and consumers. This uncertainty decreased the incentives to invest in long-lived producer and consumer goods. Particularly discouraged was the creation of small businesses, which are a major source of new hires.

It’s the standard right-wing, anti-government line, and Becker has impeccable conservative credentials, so I shouldn’t be surprised.  Still there’s something curious about it.  He pushes uncertainty to the front of the line-up and says not a word about the usual economic suspects – sales, costs, customers, demand.  It’s all about the psychology of those people in small business, their perceptions and feelings of uncertainty,  Not only are these vague and hard to measure, but as far as I know, we do not have any real data about them.  Becker provides no references.  The closest thing I could find was a small business survey from last year, and it showed that people in small business were far more worried about too little demand than about too much regulation.

Compared with Regulation, twice as many cited Sales as the number one problem.  (My posts on uncertainty from earlier this summer are here and here.)

Desperate for data, I looked at unemployment rates.  Which sectors should be most plagued by uncertainty?  I turned to Becker:

political leaders wanted to reformulate antitrust policies away from efficiency, slow the movement by the U.S. toward freer trade, add many additional regulations in the medical-care sector, levy big taxes on energy emissions, and cut opportunities to drill for oil and other fossil fuels.

OK, got it. The financial sector, medical care, and mining/fuel-extraction.  That’s where we find the greatest threat of government interference, so that’s where we should find the highest uncertainty. So those are the sectors where unemployment should be highest.   

And here are the rates as reported in the BLS August report. 

The three most uncertain sectors are also the three that are suffering the lowest rates of unemployment. 

If financial regulation has Wall Street shaking in its boots with uncertainty, that trepidation doesn’t show up in the employment numbers.  As David Weidner writes in the WSJ (here)

The securities industry still employs about 800,000 people nationwide, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That is only 7.8% fewer than the all-time high, and roughly the same as in 2006, when Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. still roamed the earth.

As for other businesses, with both taxes and interest rates at an all-time low, the time to invest and hire should be now.

[The uncertainty-about-taxes-and-regulation argument] would make more sense if, say, taxes were already high and might be going higher or regulatory burdens were heavy and might be getting heavier. But when taxes are at a 60-year low and the regulations are pretty much the same as they were in the 1990s boom, the argument makes no sense at all.  (Mark Thoma quoting an e-mail from Gary Burtless. )

Surely there must be some data showing the importance of uncertainty.  This is the US economy, not a Bob Hope movie.  I can’t imagine that a Nobelist like Becker would pull unsupported ideas out of the air.  

Personal note: As I mentioned in an earlier post, my family is trying to sell a condo in Pittsburgh.  We could put more money into fixing the place up – hiring workers to trim the garden, fix the loose tiles, replaster and paint that moldy spot on the wall where the leak was.  This hiring would be our own small contribution to economic recovery.  But when we’ve discussed it, none of us has ever mentioned uncertainty about Pennsylvania taxes or regulations.  Instead, we talk about the demand, specifically the demand for truly elegant, spacious, ideally situated condos in Shadyside.

UPDATE, Sept. 10:  A day after I posted this, Greg Ip had much better post on this topic at The Economist.

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* This is an oversimplified version, but it will do for present purposes.

Doubles Down

September 4, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

I went to the US Open on Friday.  I’ve been going every year since back in the days of Forest Hills.  I usually try to find a good doubles match.  It’s not hard.  Doubles has more action – the rapid flurry of volleys back and forth across the net, the ball zipping at a pace that leaves you gasping at how the player can even get a racket on it let alone zing it back to a precise spot.  

Yet doubles remains pretty much ignored – ignored by the media and by the public, even those who trek out to the Open.  Only the Bryan twins can attract a crowd, and they lost in the first round.  (I’m told they were off their game.)

When the team that beat the Bryans, Ivo Karlovic (6' 10") and Frank Moser (6' 6") played their next match, against an Italian team, the stands were all but empty.

And I had the feeling that about half the people there had some personal connection (coach, friend, wife, girlfriend) to one of the players.
I can think of a few reasons

1.  Fans follow individual players.  In other sports, fans follow teams, but the teams are connected with cities.  (I still check the Pirates scores even though I couldn’t name a single player on the team.)   Tennis teams are less permanent.  Part of the appeal of the Bryan twins is that we can be sure they will stay together as a team.

    To bring in new fans and generate enthusiasm among old fans, you need not just a star – a highly talented player. You need a celebrity – a Michael Jordan, a Joe Namath, a Tiger Woods.  If someone is really good, the publicity machine and turn him or her into a celebrity.  It’s hard to make teams into celebrities.  (This is true in other fields.  Yo-yo Ma, Andres Segovia, and Wynton Marsalis expanded the audiences for their respective instruments and musics.)

    The other quality that develops fan following is consistency.  Fans want someone who’s going to be in the finals tournament after tournament.  That’s much more likely in singles, which is often dominated by a single player (Connors, Sampras, Agassi) or just a handful of players who meet regularly in the finals (Federer and Nadal, Borg and McEnroe).

2.  In singles, it’s easier to see athleticism.  In doubles, the players make incredible shots, but they work in a relatively confined space.  Singles players run back and forth across the whole court, speeding and sliding and occasionally diving. 

3.  Television wants the individual celebrity.  The medium brings us “up close and personal.”  It wants a simple story with a clear ending, a head-to-head match.  I suspect that’s one of the reasons soccer still cannot find much of a TV audience.  Doubles, like soccer, depends not just on individual performance but on strategy that may be hard to see.  Singles is easier to understand.*

4.  The USTA relegates doubles to the periphery.  The difference in prize money tells the players what’s worthwhile and what isn’t.  In the old days, many players entered both the doubles and the singles draws.  No more.  It doesn’t make economic sense. 

    In its scheduling of matches at the Open the USTA treats doubles matches as though they were like the restrooms.  You have to have them, and some people may want to go, but they’re not something you want people looking at, and you don’t want to talk much about them in public.
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*Single strategy, despite the efforts of commentators, is not all that complicated.  I remember a post-match press conference where an interviewer kept asking the winner about his strategy and his opponent’s counter-strategy.  I can’t remember who the player was – this was many years ago – but he was European, and he seemed puzzled by the question.  Finally he answered, “I heet the ball to heem.  He heet the ball to me.”